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flywheel

thumb|Richard Trevithick|Trevithick's 1802 steam locomotive, which used a flywheel to evenly distribute the power of its single cylinder

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A flywheel is a heavy rotating wheel that stores energy and releases it smoothly over time, helping machines run more evenly. In early steam engines like Trevithick's 1802 locomotive, the flywheel was essential for distributing the uneven power from a single cylinder into steady, continuous motion.

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Commons category: Flywheels

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thumb|Richard Trevithick|Trevithick's 1802 steam locomotive, which used a flywheel to evenly distribute the power of its single cylinder

A flywheel is a mechanical device that uses the conservation of angular momentum to store rotational energy, a form of kinetic energy proportional to the product of its moment of inertia and the square of its rotational speed. In particular, assuming the flywheel's moment of inertia is constant (i.e., a flywheel with fixed mass and second moment of area revolving about some fixed axis) then the stored (rotational) energy is directly associated with the square of its rotational speed.